If you are going to coach middle school soccer in the city, you have to understand that half the battle is getting the team to the game- and tonight was a battle. During the winter our Lutheran "Super Conference" has four divisions divided by school sizes and locations. With soccer there are only two divisions, which is nice because we are in the "small" schools division- but the small schools are all from the suburbs. Tonight's game was in Brookfield, a 30 minute drive.
Of the 12 players present and eligible for tonight's game, only 4 had rides planned- one had a doctor's appointment and was to meet us at the game. Not necessarily a problem because my van can hold 6 and my wife's van 2. BUT, one player's dad thought he was supposed to pick his son up at the time the game actually started, so he ended up climbing in my van and making it a bit tight for the ride there. Not much traffic, but a lot of stoplights and stop signs- which is enough to drive me crazy driving a van full of middle schoolers wondering if we're going to be late or not.
When we arrived we had time for about 5 minutes of warm-ups, but our kids do not understand our simple two-pass-shot warm-up routine yet and our keeper put his keeper jersey on backwards and the three kids getting rides to the game were missing. 2 managed to show up and we started the game 10-on-10. (Our conference plays 20 minute halves which is really silly- I am used to 30 minute halves and 25 minutes for tournament games, when you are playing more than one game in a day.)
The first 10 minutes were full of "bee-hive" soccer. (My mom and dad coined this phrase when I played grade school soccer because it was easy to find the ball- it was surrounded by several kids moving like a bunch of bees.) A few minutes later our opponents scored the first goal on a pretty decent shot from far out that slipped over the outstretched arms of our keeper who has a particularly long wing span. We had a couple legit attacks, but could not get anything serious going and thus trailed 1-0 at half time. We switched keepers at half time to the keeper that started our last game partly because that was my plan at the start of the season and partly because he was pretty bummed about giving up the goal. This turned out to be my best coaching decision of the night.
In the second half both teams traded decent attacks with our few shots ending up off target and their few shots ending up being stopped in great and not-so-great ways by our keeper. Almost 10 minutes in though we finally broke through and our 6th grade forward scored his second goal of the season to even it up at 1-1.
The final 10 minutes were a classic middle school stalemate. A lot of tired kids kicking the ball everywhere and nowhere all at once. The game ended in a tie and the home coach opted for one 5 minute overtime (as opposed to two). Those five minutes did nothing as neither team could get even a shot off. So we needed penalty kicks (PK's) to decide the victor.
I was excited because I had prepped our keeper to understand that on penalty kicks in regulation the keeper must stay on the goal line, but in shoot out PK's the keeper can come off the line and charge the shot. So I selected our 5 shooters and sent our keeper off ready to charge the first two kicks and fake on the third. Then the referee told my keeper he cannot come off the line. That stunk, but we had a shoot-out to win.
They shot and scored their first PK and so did we. They missed their second... and so did we. They made their third, we missed our third. They missed their fourth... and so did we. Their fifth kick bounced off the top post, off our keeper's head and out. Our fifth kicker was/is probably our most even keeled kid- never gets emotional, ever. He calmly approached the ball and put it deep in the lower corner of the net to tie the PK's at 2 and send us to a second round of 3 PK's.
These 3 had to be 3 new players so now we were down to three kids who have never played soccer before. It seemed that our opponent was in the same predicament. We now shot first and hooked it left... so did they. Our second shooter (a left footer) hooked it right, they shot it over the cross bar. Our third kicker- my biggest attitudinal issue thus far this season - came through with a shot the fooled the keeper. As our keeper headed out I told our team to make sure they piled on him after he won the game for us. Turned out he did not need to be all that ready as their third player missed the goal entirely- but our kids still piled on him to celebrate our second victory in as many games this season.
The good news about winning two out of two so far is that I have been able to challenge the kids to imagine how much better we could be if we: didn't complain about laps, fight with Coach over drills, started listening to the coaching Coach does in practice. I think the kids feel good about themselves (as rightfully they should) and I would like to think they might be coming around to understanding why Coach does what he does in practice.
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